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And one for the road (trip)

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

ROCKY ROAD: APTLY NAMED SNACK FOR HIGHWAY TRAVEL

A moving vehicle is no place for
squidgy food and as much as a sandwich with an oozy slaw or freshly
reconstituted soupy cup noodles will hit the spot on a long car journey, they
are just a recipe for disaster. This kind of food should be restricted to rest
areas and picnic tables.

Biscuits (or cookies) are made
for travel. After all, in their earliest form, they were hard square crackers
made only with water and flour. They were convenient food for soldiers,
explorers and pioneers due to their long storage life, and were perfect for
those long journeys over land and sea.

However, like saucy food, it's
better to keep to chewy – perhaps even cakey – cookies instead of crumbly ones
for the car.

In terms of aptly named snacks
for a car trip, a perfect one would be Rocky Road (in real life, of course, we
can do without the bumps!). Rocky Road started out as a milk chocolate bar with
marshmallow and cashew nuts. Later, a chocolate ice cream with walnuts and
marshmallows used the same name, and then, a baker translated the concoction
into a brownie, with a gooey topping of marshmallow, nuts and chocolate chips.

Rocky Road has all the
components that I like but sticky marshmallow is not car-ride-friendly. So I
swapped the brownie base for a chewy cookie dough and wrapped it around a
marshmallow so the gooey bit would be in the centre. I added some coffee to
bring out the flavour of the chocolate rather than to help with alertness.

Car ride cookies

I've
posted on other road-themed snacks before. One of them was the Happy
Trails Bar, which is made with trail mix (dried fruit, grains, nuts). It's
kind of on the healthy side – which defeats the purpose of a road trip snack!

Another
suggestion was Tiger
Brownies, which I based on the old slogan of a petrol company, "Put a
tiger in your tank". These are good ol' fudgy chocolate brownies with
swirls of orange-coloured and flavoured cream cheese. They're best eaten
chilled so they’re probably not ideal for a long car ride.

Finally,
a snack with an entertaining and unusual shape whose name fits the road trip
theme – at least for someone in no hurry to get anywhere: Turtle
Cookies!

Note on the recipe:

I
am normally fastidious with keeping ingredient quantities to either weight or
volume, but in this instance, there is a mix of both measurements – I feel
butter and flour need to be weighed exactly, while there's room to play around
with the quantity of chocolate chunks and pecans. It works for me ;-)

Rocky Road Chunky Chews

Makes 12 large cookies

100g butter (a little less than ½ cup), softened

½ cup firmly packed soft brown sugar

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tbsp instant coffee granules

½ tbsp hot water

155g (about 1¼ cup) plain flour

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp sea salt or ¼ tsp table salt

¾ cup coarsely chopped semi-sweet chocolate

¾ cup coarsely chopped pecans

6 regular-sized marshmallows, cut in half

Cream butter and sugar together.
Beat in egg and vanilla extract. Dissolve coffee granules in hot water and add
to the mixture.

Combine flour, bicarbonate of
soda and salt; fold into butter mixture. Stir in chocolate chunks and nuts.
Place the dough in the fridge for 15 minutes to firm up.

Divide the dough into 12 equal
portions. Flatten one piece and place a marshmallow half in the centre. Fold
the dough around the marshmallow to enclose it and form a thick disc. Repeat
with the remaining dough and marshmallows.